{"id":232281,"date":"2025-05-09T07:23:45","date_gmt":"2025-05-09T07:23:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/american-history\/americanstudies-may-9-2025-the-works-progress-administration-wartime-evolutions\/"},"modified":"2025-05-09T07:23:45","modified_gmt":"2025-05-09T07:23:45","slug":"americanstudies-may-9-2025-the-works-progress-administration-wartime-evolutions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=232281","title":{"rendered":"AmericanStudies: May 9, 2025: The Works Progress Administration: Wartime Evolutions"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

\n

[On May 6th<\/sup>,
\n1935<\/a>, Franklin Roosevelt established the Works
\nProgress Administration<\/a> [WPA]. So this week I\u2019ll AmericanStudy a
\nhandful of WPA histories, leading up to a weekend post on why we need a 21st<\/sup>
\ncentury revival!]<\/p>\n

On two
\ndistinct but interconnected ways the WPA evolved in the early war years (before
\nRoosevelt
\ndiscontinued it<\/a> in December 1942), and what we can make of the combination.<\/span><\/p>\n

I hadn\u2019t
\nreally thought about it this way until researching this series, but thanks to
\nthe WPA (and other New Deal programs, but especially the WPA) the U.S. was far better
\nprepared for the transition into a nation at war than otherwise would have been
\nthe case. As historian Nick Taylor puts it in his book American-Made:
\nThe Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work<\/a><\/i> (2008), \u201cOnly the WPA, having employed millions
\nof relief workers for more than five years, had a comprehensive awareness of
\nthe skills that would be available in a full-scale national emergency. As the
\ncountry began its preparedness buildup, the WPA was uniquely positioned to
\nbecome a major defense agency.\u201d Long before Pearl Harbor, it did indeed occupy that
\nposition<\/a>, with between 600,000 and 700,000 WPA workers transitioning to defense
\nprojects in the second half of 1940. And after the U.S. formally entered the
\nwar, those efforts only ramped up across the country, as literally illustrated
\nby this photograph<\/a> of WPA researchers preparing an air raid warning map for
\nNew Orleans on December 11, 1941. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, \u201cdefense\u201d came to mean something much more specific and far
\nmore divisive and discriminatory in the days and weeks and months after Pearl
\nHarbor, and unfortunately the WPA also occupied a central position and role in
\nthose far different wartime efforts. Indeed, the WPA\u2019s last major project<\/a>,
\nundertaken throughout its final year of existence, was the construction, maintenance,
\nand staffing of the concentration camps at which Japanese Americans were incarcerated.
\nThe infamous Manzanar Relocation
\nCenter<\/a> in California, for example, was estimated to be \u201cmanned just about
\n100% by the WPA.\u201d And Harry Hopkins himself, subject of a good deal of deserved
\npraise in earlier posts in this series, praised
\nwartime WPA<\/a> administrator Howard
\nO. Hunter<\/a> for the \u201dbuilding of those camps for the War Department for the
\nJapanese evacuees on the West Coast.\u201d The camps were a federal construction project,
\nand a tragically sizable one at that, so it stands to reason that the WPA would
\nundertake this effort\u2014but at the same time, this is another side of the WPA I
\nhadn\u2019t known about prior to researching this series, and certainly not one I
\nwas happy to discover.<\/span><\/p>\n

Obviously I\u2019m not going to be able to boil all this down in any succinct
\nway in this final paragraph, but I\u2019ll say this: I\u2019ve written and talked and
\nthought a great deal in recent years about the worst
\nand best of America<\/a> (a phrase I found myself using constantly in my recent podcast<\/a>, for example);
\nand I can\u2019t really imagine a more clear and dramatic representation of that phrase
\nthan the WPA, the same social relief organization that helped save so many
\nAmericans and the nation as a whole to boot, working on one of the most exclusionary
\nand horrific projects in America\u2019s collective history. Our history is so messy,
\nand, as Trip from <\/span>Glory<\/span><\/i> put it so evocatively, \u201cain\u2019t nobody clean.\u201d I could end every series
\non this blog with a version of that sentiment, and maybe I should. <\/span><\/p>\n

Special
\npost this weekend,<\/span><\/p>\n

Ben<\/span><\/p>\n

PS. What
\ndo you think?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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